Wednesday, 9 September 2015

The dying flame

Courts, governments and the bureaucracy are
stuffed with people like us. They do not develop a higher IQ or reach a higher
plan of intelligence because they occupy that position. Socially, they are
shaped by the same influences we grew up with.

And look around you. Don't you have the nosy
Uncle who wants to know who you're dating? The meddlesome neighbour who
comments on what you wear? The irritating cousin who has an opinion on your
career choice? The 'friend' who disapproves your eating habits?

I have known all of the above. Especially the
last - a chap who ordered 'Tomato onion uthappa, don't put onion in it, and
don't put onion on the sambar either."

We didn't care, we wanted the world to let us
be, to wear what we liked, to love who we liked and eat, drink and make merry.
We laughed at their quirks and brushed them off, thinking they lived in the
past, even the young ones among them. The future was ours, the future was
liberal, and hey - wasn't it more fun to have a kebab at a shady joint in Mahim
with that inappropriately-dressed girl who really *got* you, than to worry
about those people?

Well, something happened while we weren't
looking. They earned money, because they followed the norms of the world as it
existed, not as we thought it ought to be. They became top-ranking bureaucrats,
they became judges, they got close to, or became, the political leadership of
the country.

And now we wonder that they want to dictate
to us what we eat, who we see and what we wear (among other things)?

Did we not try hard enough? Did we fail
somewhere? Or is this just how it is - the worst of humanity destined to lord
over the rest because it appeals to the darkness within?

I guess it is - they won the War a long time
ago. The battles that have followed have only been meaningless skirmishes in a
theatre where the end is already scripted.

Unless there is some way to tear up the script. Burn
it. Write a better ending.

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About Me

Percy Slacker was bitten by Schrodinger’s Cat as a child, and has since then combined a deep fear of cats with an
abiding conviction that he both exists and does not exist at the same
time. This existential doubt has led him
to grow up to be a writer while not actually being a writer.

He lives in Mumbai with his family, his book collection and a firm
conviction that modern civilization is in an interminable decline.